


Reconstitution

by lesshoney



Category: Quantum Break
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-02 22:54:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6585928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesshoney/pseuds/lesshoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paul wasn't wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

OCTOBER 10 2016 /// 1 YEAR 29 DAYS TO RETRIEVAL

The CFR went off. Paul scrambled for it, moving with inhuman speed and his joints screaming. It was a last-ditch effort to stop Jack from ruining - _everything_.

He fell. He never landed. 

He disintegrated, or rather, he converged, all of his many selves. He plunged into an ocean of time, of potential, of causality, one particle in a vast maelstrom. There were tides in this ocean, tides that flowed and bent according to the innermost workings of the universe: gravities of dying stars and the froth of gamma radiation. 

And he was borne along, churning through his many selves in turn.

/

Jack’s fast living caught up with him: drunk, weaving along the coastal road on his motorcycle, he didn’t see the truck or didn’t care. He died at Riverport University Trauma Center at 4:27 a.m., three hours after the crash. Paul was at his bedside.

Paul lived in that hell for almost a full minute. 

/

Best man on Jack’s wedding day. Heart breaking, grabbing another flute of champagne, spilling it but smiling when Jack threw an arm around his shoulder and thanked him for everything - 

/ 

Jack holding his hand. Rings. Their glint caught his eye, and then his knees, and the feel of the paper sheet under him, where he was perched on an exam table. The doctor had just finished giving them bad news. Biopsy results showed… Paul stopped listening to the doctor.

Jack squeezed his hand, effortlessly determined. All love and valor. “We’ll beat this.”

Paul already knew he wouldn't. Seven months and three days.

 /

Paul and his wife, Vanessa, who liked him well enough, but loved his money more. A dinner party at their waterfront home. They invited Jack and Will, and a couple of her single friends. Vanessa liked charity cases. Dinner went as well as Paul expected - Will was a spaceman, Jack was a dick. Jack drank too much, ran his mouth. At the end of the night, Paul put him in one of the spare bedrooms. Jack broke down. Some girl; it always was. Paul got another bottle and they drank until dawn, in companionable misery.

 /

Jack became a dad for the first time on Father’s Day. What were the odds of that? Paul asked, making conversation as he drove Will to the hospital to meet his nephew. 

Will rattled off the exact odds. Paul smiled. He and Will had grown closer - if that was the word - since Jack’s marriage. Jack didn’t have time to babysit his brother anymore. He had a family. 

“A real family,” Jack explained, right in front of Will. He probably didn’t realize how much that hurt. 

 /

Paul inhabited each one of these endless forms, flashing through consciousnesses, instincts, emotions, forever drowning. Eternally. Paul the father, Paul the husband, Paul who died young and Paul who lived too long, Paul the addict, the soldier, the vagrant, the monster, the savior, the traitor, the betrayed. There were women and men - beautiful, plain, adoring, mean - but sometimes - most of the time - no one. And then, sometimes, there was Jack. Fighting, loving, falling out, fucking - the whole panoply of potential in a human existence. 

Time didn’t pass here. There were no reference points. Four dimensions, no sense of direction. Paul might have been adrift for eternity, or a matter of minutes. 

But suddenly, a hand scooped into that vast and green ocean and brought him up out of the dark. 

* * *

NOV 7, 2017 /// 0 HOURS TO RETRIEVAL

“You don’t know what you’ll get back,” Will said, over the speaker. He was behind a two foot-thick wall of reinforced glass and transparent steel, watching his brother in the adjoining room. Will was at the control station - a junky old laptop that still ran Windows Vista, because that was how Will rolled. He typed in a few commands. “I mean, will he be the bastard you knew? Someone you’ve never met? He might be a stranger.” 

“He won’t be a stranger,” Jack said, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. He clenched his fists. This room was a cell. Will was the only one who could open the door.

“I know you won’t listen to me. But Jack…” Will glanced at his brother’s face. It was pointless to try to argue. He spun his chair to the bank of switches on his right side. “This is only going to work once. Okay? And only here. Think about that _one more time_.”

They were beneath Monarch, at the epicenter of what would have been the Lifeboat. A secured control center, in the bedrock a few levels below the atrium. Will had re-wired the Lifeboat’s brains. The Lifeboat had a new panopticon of cameras and reinforced steel doors, and chronon dampeners installed alongside the fire suppression systems. 

Will was not happy about the situation. It had been a weird twelve months since the CFR, Paul, Beth... everything. But Monarch had fallen at Jack’s feet, and they couldn’t hide. There was nowhere - no _when_ \- to hide from Monarch. So day in and day out, Will worked in the belly of the beast. 

Will flipped the bank of switches. The floor plating in the room hummed as chronon particles flowed along their beams. Jack stepped onto them, toward the semi-broken CFR, looking like a head on a post at the center of their setup. 

“The boundaries are stable," Will reported. "It's now or never.”

“Okay,” Jack said tensely. 

Will pressed the big red button. The CFR, almost drained and mostly burnt out, glowed feebly. Will aligned a couple more actuators, and brought the power levels up. Up again. 

“Go,” Will said. 

Jack plunged his hands into the white light.

Particles flowed. Tiny tears in the Meyer-Joyce field mended, stabilized. Echoes in physical space played around them - but they were from far away, across town, the old swimming pool. Jack and Will, and Paul’s final moments. Jack didn’t understand it. Will had tried to explain it - if the CFR is a VCR, Jack, your chrono field is that _Barely-Legal Babes in Toyland_ tape you played til it broke.

The echoes started off ghostly, flickering - just like an old VCR tape. They got stronger, slower, until finally - 

* * *

Paul fell. He landed. 

The blow knocked the breath out of his lungs, which was lucky, because otherwise, he would have forgotten how to breathe. He choked on the air, sucking and coughing as if it were seawater - what was the atmosphere, after all, but an ocean of air? He thrashed, and Will told Jack to do something. 

Jack had dropped the chronon particle transfer in shock, when he heard Paul hit the floor. Now, just following Will’s voice, he moved to Paul. He dropped to one knee and flipped him over. 

That seemed to help. Paul’s fingers hooked into the metal grate of the floor, and he took a few shaky gasps. 

“Paul,” Jack said. 

* * * 

He was face down on the floor. He scrabbled for purchase, anything to anchor him and stop creation spinning.

“Paul,” a sharp voice called, loud and terrible as God’s.

For a moment, Paul thought it was Martin Hatch, and despair welled up in him, almost washed his heart right out of his chest. He tried to shake his head. “No. No, no, no.” He mouthed the words silently. 

His body - a singular body, two arms, two legs, whole, inviolate - was aching, and weak as a newborn’s. He couldn’t run if he tried. He couldn’t even crawl.

The ringing in his ears faded a little, and he heard his name again: “Paul.”

And then he realized: Jack. 

He was blind - no, he had forgotten how to see. The room around them was one, static, stable causality. His mind had forgotten what that was like. He groped forward.

“I brought you back,” Jack said, still in that terrible voice. 

Paul trembled. “Why?” he managed. One syllable took everything he had.

Activity. Paul could feel the after-shocks, every particle of air moving, as Jack put a hand on Paul’s hair. Gentle. “It’s time for you to come home.”

Paul managed to wrap one arm around Jack’s leg, like a drowning man grabs for anything afloat. He put his head against Jack’s shoe, and wept.


	2. Chapter 2

NOVEMBER 7 2017 /// 118 SECONDS POST-RETRIEVAL

Jack stepped aside as the security and science teams moved in. Paul had lost consciousness; they sedated him anyway. Jack made himself scarce as the chronon dampeners came online all over the Lifeboat. Jack didn’t like being near them.

Will stayed to oversee the security goons taking Paul into custody. They strapped him to a gurney and took him to the Lifeboat’s medbay for a full audit.

“You audit _inventory_ ,” Will muttered, to no one in particular. No one was paying any attention to him. 

Paul stayed in medical for nine hours, while they ran every biometric and chronon-analysis they could. 

Jack received the report - at least, the parts of it Monarch would share with him - on his tablet at the end of the day. He skimmed it. He wasn’t much for science.

Subject: Serene, Paul. Male. Telomere length and accumulated base pair mutations consistent with 40-50 years of age.

“He’s 45. Just say it,” Jack muttered. Height, weight, blood chemistry… Jack ran his eyes down the meaningless columns of numbers. 

There was a note at the end:

PSYCH PROFILE TO FOLLOW

Jack hit reply:

I can save you some time. Complete psycho.

NOVEMBER 6 2017 /// 20 HOURS TO RETRIEVAL

The door of his quarters chimed. Jack’s limbs jerked, and he woke up from a vision-filled sleep in one quick snap. He was lucky so far; he could still tell what was _present_ , no matter how vivid the dreams got. He wondered what it would be like after seventeen years. 

He was fully dressed, in a white t-shirt, grey sweat pants, and wearing his blue running shoes. He had tried to exhaust himself on the treadmill last night. It had worked a little too well. 

The door chimed again. Jack looked at the clock. It was still night; three a.m. He rolled off the bed and hit the intercom. “Yeah?”

Will’s staccato voice came through the speaker. “Jack. It’s me.”

Jack opened the door for him. Will stepped through, and the smell of someone who had been thinking for four or five days, instead of washing, followed him. 

Will stopped awkwardly at the top of the stairs. He glanced at the windows, and then his eyes scrolled left to right, as if he was reading a script he had prepared. “How are things on Olympus?”

Jack smiled. “Olympus” was anything about the tenth or eleventh floor, according to Will. They had given Jack Paul’s quarters, with its gleaming white and stainless steel. Jack had kept the ultra-mod furniture but he had ditched the sculptures, replacing them with a weight bench, a treadmill, and a rowing machine arrayed on the mezzanine. The color scheme got an update, too: dark blues, greys, blacks. But it was still very Monarch, very seat of the gods. Paul really was a vain son of a bitch.

“I can have them move your lab up here any time,” Jack said. 

“No, thank you.” Will shook his head. Will had quarters up here too, but he never used them. He spent twenty-three hours a day sulking in his lab in the basement. It was part of a larger farm of labs, and Monarch loved their transparent walls. Will had started taping newspaper up; so far no one had stopped him. He had a camping bed and sleeping bag down there too, so he could sleep surrounded by his work, weave in and out of it with minimal interruption. 

“Do you know it’s three a.m.?” Jack asked.

Will glanced at Jack in surprise. So, that was a ‘no’. 

“Were you asleep?” Will asked.

“I’m not sure,” Jack said. He really didn’t know if it was sleep, or if it was something else. A journey, a… shift. So far, he always came back. 

“I came to tell you, the CFR is almost ready. We’ll have one shot.”

“I know. I saw it.” Jack crossed his arms over his t-shirt. 

Jack had been thinking about Beth, lately. His promise to her. But Martin Hatch had another name at the top of his list: Paul Serene. 

Weeks of arguing. Weeks of Martin insisting, gently, firmly, rationally, articulately, that Jack look at the facts they had, the known quantities, the truth. They hadn’t stopped the End of Time at all. Jack had seen the maps Paul left behind, and was starting to use his own power to re-trace some of Paul’s footsteps. 

“What did you see?” Will asked.

“Beth. We tried to find her… and we…” In a flash, Jack propelled himself to the windows. Will crossed the distance to stand at his brother’s side.

They looked out over Riverport silently.

“What did you see?” Will asked again.

“We went for Beth. We brought something back… it wasn’t her.” There was no way to describe the violence Jack had beheld. The terror. The ever-widening Fracture and this power that seemed to feed from it. 

“What about Paul?” Will asked, sounding clinical. Interested, but not invested.

“It's different. When he recollides with the timeline... “ Jack stared at his own reflection in the windows, the tiny bolts of light in his irises. The timeline, the one they were coasting now, was a single, tenuous thread against a backdrop of nothing; a long, dead dark that had no end. Jack scanned the Riverport horizon, the edge of light rimming the harbor and the inky ocean beyond. The timeline stuttered, seized, went dark. Without Paul, the universe flat-lined.

And then, suddenly, blazing fractals pirouetting off into infinity. Further than the human mind could comprehend, more beautiful and complex than mere words could ever convey. Jack tried, failed, to put it into words. Maybe it had already been said best: _Let there be light._

“So, it’s Paul,” Will said. He sounded the opposite of enthusiastic. 

“Yeah.”

“I’ll get everything ready,” Will said. 

Jack tilted his head a fraction of an inch, and Will’s reflection disappeared. 

NOVEMBER 7, 2016 /// 10 HOURS POST-RETRIEVAL

Jack was escorted back down to the Lifeboat. He walked quickly, ahead of his minders, because he wanted to get this over with. He had a knot in his gut. 

Paul had been moved to a cell, custom-built for the purpose. The walls, made of foot-thick material, transparent and stronger than steel, joined together to form a hexagon. They were inlaid with thin metal conductors, evoking a prison cell, though with a subtler, more clinical look. No privacy anywhere. Security camera coverage from multiple angles. 

The floor and ceiling of the cell gleamed like stainless steel. They were re-purposed corridor panels from Will’s time machine, full of conduits that channeled chronon particles in a steady, circulating flow. And the muscle behind all this was the CFR, pumping out energy in fits and spurts, like a failing heart. A nuclear fission reactor acted as a pacemaker for the CFR. 

The door to the cell was a bulkhead that opened inward, made of the same stuff as the ceiling and floor. Jack held himself still as a Monarch Security officer hauled the door open. Martin Hatch stood at the door, ushering Jack in.

“Will did his part,” Hatch said gratefully. He ignored Will’s snort. “Now it’s time for you to do yours, Jack.”

Jack glanced at Will, who was staring down at his console. He looked to Martin, who smiled thinly, without emotion. 

Jack stepped into the bay. He hesitated. They needed this. Everyone needed him to do this. Jesus Christ. That kind of responsibility could get heavy really fast. 

Martin followed him in, and stood back. 

Jack approached Paul, staked and strapped to the exam table like Hannibal Lector. 

Paul looked at peace. He looked dead, in fact. He was covered with a medical-green blanket, he was stiff, EKG electrodes were patched to his unmoving chest. The heart monitor bolted to the wall showed a baseline… nothing. No heartbeat. He was frozen again. 

“What am I supposed to do?” Jack asked. He didn’t want to be here. 

“We need an infusion of chronon particles, but we’re testing exact amounts,” the technician reported. “He’s unstable. So, start slow, and we’ll work our way up.” 

“How unstable is he?” Jack asked, eyes glued to Paul. 

Will, from his control console outside the cell, talked into his mic: “This place is powered by a nuclear reactor, and it’s _all_ going to this room.”

“Hope nobody tries to use the microwave and the toaster at the same time,” Jack said dryly. But inside he was thinking, _oh, shit_.

He steeled himself. He reached out to Paul, and then he jerked his hand back as if he had touched a hot stove, swearing, taking another step backwards. “What the hell -?” He shook his hand, brought it up in front of his face. No physical damage, but it hurt like hell.

“You feel it, don’t you, Jack?” Martin asked quietly. 

“Yeah,” Jack said, shaking his fingers again. “What is it?”

“He’s ... unstable.”

Paul was unconscious, but subtly in motion. Up close, Jack could see that Paul was not so much _Paul_ as a collection of atoms, spinning and flowing, sometimes blurring his features, sometimes bringing them into oddly sharp relief. A chronon-disrupted lifeform. Almost a shifter. Touching him had felt like sticking his hand into a blender of jagged glass. 

“Try again,” Martin ordered. 

Jack was more careful this time. He raised his hand over Paul and let the chronon stream flow. 

He saw Paul take an actual breath. His chest rose and fell. The oxygen meter above the bed flashed some numbers.

“Independent physiological response,” the tech reported. “Encouraging.”

“More?” Jack asked.

“Please, Mr. Joyce,” Hatch said, clasping his hands behind his back and watching very intently. 

Jack did it again. He concentrated this time, and let the power inside course through his hand and into the chaos. 

He felt the changes. Sensed them. Whatever. Paul started to feel a little more solid, a little more real. Jack poured more of himself into it, he felt the resistance, and that made him mad. He shoved harder, someone tried to get his attention through his earpiece but all he could hear was his heartbeat slamming, and his ears starting to ring -

“Jack, _stop_ ,” It was Will’s voice that broke through. Jack staggered. 

One security guard at his left elbow, the technician at his right. Will carping at him through his earpiece. “Be careful.” Will was at the glass wall of the cell, peering in. 

Hatch was standing by, impassive as always, but taking everything in. “We have to do this slowly, Mr. Joyce. We can’t have you burning yourself out. We have weeks of work ahead.”

Hatch nodded at the security officer, who stepped away from Jack. 

The heart monitor bolted to the wall had come to life. Jack stared at it stupidly, dazed. 

Hatch came closer. “Go rest, Jack. We’ll need you again later. Mr. Joyce, can you assist him?”

Will came to the cell door. Jack stumbled through, still caught in some kind of tail spin. He glanced back at Paul as the bulkhead swung shut, and Will grabbed his arm.

* * *

Will helped Jack to his lab, with the camping bed. Jack would sleep, Will would work. Being present, even if he was mentally several galaxies away, was the only comfort Will knew how to give. It had worked when Jack was small. 

Jack climbed onto the creaking, swaying metal frame, and pulled Will’s sleeping back up over him. He felt like he hadn’t slept in days. He was drained. Burned out. And everything he had given wasn’t nearly enough. It was hardly even a start. He stared at the ceiling, crossed his arms above his head, hiding his eyes with his wrists. He heard Will pull the rolling chair away from his desk.

“He’s so _broken_ , Will.”

Will glanced at Jack’s face, or what he could see of it. His little brother was shaken. “My calculations showed -”

“Did we do the right thing?” Jack interrupted.

Will had no data. He didn’t even attempt an answer.


End file.
